Having a great time here. It is such an adventure. Nothing is straight forward - even getting to a restaurant. But that is the fun of it all! Somehow it always works out. Last night for example we were endeavouring to catch a taxi by ourselves to meet some friends of Tammys and Dave's - Joel and Cass -at a restaurant. The restaurant is the best place in Beijing for Peking Duck. A pretty tall order given it originated from here! The cab driver didn't speak english so we had to take the chinese name with us to show him. We made it there but it turned out the restaurant had a power outage. This took some time to figure out - again because of the language difficulties. We didnt even know if we were at the right place and we didnt have a phone so couldn't call Tammy's friends. After much kaffuffle we eventually gave up and tried to indicate to the taxi driver to take us home. He seemed to understand. So we took off. But then we ended up somewhere else. He couldn't tell us where we were but was very adamant that we should get out. So we did. We walked over to a block of restaurants, where he was pointing and found ourselves at another fancy restaurant. It had a similar name and turned out to be a sister restaurant of the one we had wanted. We went in, still having no idea how to get in touch with Joel and Cass. Turns out, they were having the same difficulties at us. To cut a long story short, they had gotten the same message at the previous restaurant. They'd tried to go elsewhere but the taxi driver wouldn't accept their money - he thought it was fake! But then, he ended up taking them to the same restaurant we were at and we found each other! We had a great night. The duck was delicious! Washed it down with a nice bottle of Chianti.

So that is China!

My other favourite experience was climbing the Great Wall of China. It was magnificent! The views were out of this world. And we were lucky to have such great weather on the day. It was clearer than our driver had ever seen. Here are some pics for you. I had to pinch myself when I saw it, You never really think you will see such beautiful things in person. Amazing.

And turns out three seated bikes are a pretty efficient mode of transport in China.